Reform or Repression. Chad Pearson
of a modest-sized Bostonbased wholesale liquor and beer bottling company, head of the Employers’ Association of Massachusetts, and a former leader of the influential Citizens’ Industrial Association of America (CIAA)—drew an especially stark contrast between the two basic choices facing workers in 1909: “Properly defined, individualism means progressive civilization, order, and liberty. Collectivism means retrogression, chaos, compulsion, and, at its best, state servitude.”4 In an effort to find solutions to the many-sided labor problem, employers like Hugo had built alliances with one another and with members of their communities, lobbied politicians, organized public lectures, published and distributed pamphlets, and fired and blacklisted working-class activists who demanded collective bargaining rights.5 Paradoxically, early twentieth-century employers, including many self-identified reformers, established hundreds of “defense” organizations—both restrictive employers’ associations and the more inclusive “citizens’” alliances—largely to discourage workers from participating in their own confrontational, class-based associations.
No issue better highlights employers’ combination of reformist and combative tendencies, this study maintains, than their widespread involvement in establishing open-shop workplaces—workplaces run by employers who refused to recognize or negotiate with labor unions—and in creating a well-organized and mostly effective open-shop movement. Organized employers, many of whom were stalwart Republicans, invented and popularized the anti-labor union open-shop theory—which they presented as a nondiscriminatory managerial principle, welcoming both union and nonunion “free” men—in the aftermath of the late nineteenth-century labor actions that rocked much of the nation.6 Soon, thousands embraced the theory and took part in the open-shop movement, which was designed to liberate employers and nonunionists from what they considered the burdens of collective bargaining, labor unrest, and “class dictation.” In short, employers demanded greater freedom to hire and fire.7 By the early post-World War I period, 1,665 separate employers and business associations throughout the country officially supported the open-shop movement and enforced this managerial policy in their workplaces.8 This study examines the origins, character, growth, and limitations of the first-wave open-shop movement—which emerged at the turn of the century and concluded when the United States entered World War I—by exploring the colorful figures behind it and the ideas and events that influenced them.
Who exactly were these figures? One cannot offer a perfectly exhaustive sociological portrait of the thousands of merchants, manufacturers, coal mine bosses, bankers, railroad executives, clergymen, lawyers, journalists, academics, and nonunion workers who gave the movement its character and direction. But this study does explore some of the most influential, outspoken, and visible open-shop proponents, examining their involvement in campaigns against the labor problem both nationally and in several important industrial centers: Cleveland, Buffalo, Worcester, Massachusetts, and southern areas of the United States. Indeed, this book, in part because of its spatial approach, illuminates both the national and regional dimensions of the open-shop movement’s foundational history.9
We can actually make some generalizations about many of the individuals who participated in the assorted groups that helped launch and lead this movement. A glance at the membership of the National Metal Trades Association (NMTA), the National Founders’ Association (NFA), and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—influential business organizations that emerged in the late nineteenth century—reveals that numerous members identified with the Republican Party, resided in northern and midwestern cities, and shared a profound appreciation for America’s economic vibrancy. Some had fought as Union soldiers during the Civil War, and most held the nation’s political history and institutions in high esteem. Many were engineers, managed various-sized specialized manufacturing establishments, celebrated periods of prosperity, and coped, as best as they could, with periodic economic downturns. These relatively privileged men, residing in cities like Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Worcester, also joined commercial clubs, engineering societies, higher education alumni groups, Republican leagues, and English-style gentlemen’s associations—organizations that offered intellectual and social stimulation and thus fostered class-based bonds of friendship and solidarity. By century’s end, these figures—the architects and beneficiaries of what historians have long called the second industrial revolution—had ultimately developed a common concern with the labor problem, the primary force that they believed threatened to undermine their collective goals of financial prosperity, industrial progress, and managerial stability.10 In 1903, Frank Vanderlip, a New York banker and open-shop proponent summed up these fears succinctly, warning that “the only serious obstacle” to these objectives “will be our labor organizations.”11
This study brings to light the efforts of the numerous activists who helped convince employers to join with one another to confront this “serious obstacle.” One of the most influential individuals we will meet was an ambitious and talented Cincinnati-based organizer named Ernest F. Du Brul, a partner in the large Miller, Du Brul, and Peters Manufacturing Company, a highly productive and internationally recognized cigar mold manufacturing establishment. Beginning in 1902, the Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins educated Du Brul organized numerous recruitment trips and met with audiences of engineers and manufacturers in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. In early 1903, Du Brul expressed enormous satisfaction with the results of his enlistment campaigns in a newspaper interview: “in about 100 different places central bodies of employers are now flourishing.”12 Du Brul helped motivate many fellow union critics, including David M. Parry, the Indianapolis-based carriage manufacturer who helped turn the NAM into the nation’s most recognized open-shop organization in spring 1903. Speaking to an excited crowd of 400 like-minded open-shop proponents, including Du Brul, in Indianapolis in early 1904, Parry explained that “the cry is going up in every part of the country: ‘we want to be organized’.”13
This book does not limit itself to members of manufacturers’ associations in the Northeast or Midwest. As Parry noted, not all open-shop activists lived in highly industrialized cities in these regions, and some preferred to join one of the hundreds of “citizens’ associations” rather than one or more of the less inclusive employers’ organizations. For example, an additional noteworthy labor movement foe, Wilbur F. Sanders—western pioneer, 1860s vigilante, and one of Montana’s first two U.S. senators—helped lead both the Citizens’ Alliance of Helena and the larger, more powerful CIAA in the early twentieth century. The CIAA—comprised of open-shop activists from throughout the nation, including many from small and moderate-sized western cities—campaigned for “the maintenance of industrial peace, the preservation of constitutional rights, and the creation of public sentiment against all forms of violence, coercion and intimidation,” wrote George Creel, a Kansas City newspaperman and one of its spokespersons, in 1903.14
Union opponents were especially successful in the South. And another prominent CIAA member we will meet is Birmingham’s N. F. Thompson, an enthusiastic regional booster, Confederate veteran, and one of the first Ku Klux Klan heads. Thompson had earned a reputation for his unapologetic condemnations of labor unrest at the turn of the century. In 1900, for example, the former Klansman called for the enactment of “justifiable homicide” laws in the context of labor-management disputes. Such laws would provide employers with the legal right to murder those who threatened, in Thompson’s words, the “right [of Americans] to earn an honest living.”15 By exploring the activities of individuals like Sanders and Thompson, this study draws fresh connections between nineteenth-century vigilantism and racial violence on the one hand and early twentieth-century anti-union activism on the other. Indeed, both Sanders and Thompson invoked the politics of law and order in the context of confrontations with labor in the 1900s, just as they had previously during their respective struggles against gold thieves and insubordinate former slaves in the 1860s. A proper analysis of the movement’s activists and leaders, as this study demonstrates, requires that we reckon with this deep history.
Many open-shop activists did not start their adult lives as businessmen or elite politicians. Some, like NFA chief organizer John A. Penton, were even once active in the labor movement before switching sides. Well before he worked for the